Kyle City Council repeals city-paid insurance option for council members

KYLE — After residents turned in more than 1,000 signatures on a petition to repeal a vote that allows council members to receive health insurance at the same rate as full-time city employees, Kyle City Council voted 5-1 to remove all health insurance benefits at its Aug. 3 special meeting.

This special meeting comes after residents garnered signatures from 25% of registered voters from the 2023 election within Kyle city limits. According to Courtney Goza, a resident who was aiding the force of the petition, 1,115 signatures were collected. This petition for referendum, as allowed by the city charter, required the city council to suspend the ordinance and move forward with one of the following options:

• Adopt the proposed initiative ordinance without any change in substance

• Repeal the referred ordinance

• Call an election on the proposed or referred ordinance

At the beginning of the discussion, city of Kyle Attorney Aimee Alcorn-Reed provided her opinion on the healthcare item prior to the initial vote in April after council members waived their attorney-client privilege. She stated that the city charter did not explicitly prohibit council from receiving healthcare, but rather it was case law, which was then determined to not prohibit additional benefits, such as health insurance.

“That’s the backstory. We pursued and looked at health insurance several times through the years. I’ve always felt that it was a good thing for council to have, but the thing that changed this year is we were told that it didn’t violate the charter and that we could just move forward because it wasn’t considered compensation,” said Mayor Travis Mitchell. “The letter of the law could not have been broken because we had attorneys telling us that we could move forward, but you don’t elect us to do what attorneys tell us we can do; you elect us to represent you and we did not do a good job.”

According to Mitchell, council was told initially that the petition would be thrown out, due to the change requiring a budget amendment. (Note: the initial vote in April made a budget amendment, which provided $133,078.68 to pay for the council member insurance.)

“I did not feel that that was appropriate to try to squash the folks who wanted to go out and exercise their voice,” said Mitchell. “You rightly exposed a decision that we made, that we had a hard time standing on because we didn’t follow the process that we set out to follow.”

Council member Miguel Zuniga had a concern that health insurance would be brought forward in the future, so he wanted to know if there would be “safeguards” to prevent it. Mitchell responsed that the community will hold council to their standards, but at the same time, council still has a right to vote on what it thinks is best.

“This is the same point that I was trying to make because we are going to be in the same situation, Mr. Zuniga. It is going to come up again,” explained council member Michael Tobias, after explaining that repealing ordinance 1310, which allowed council members to receive health insurance at the same rate as full-time employees, does not mean that it will repeal ordinance 1043. Ordinance 1043 was established in May 2019 to allow council members to participate in the city’s health insurance “provided that the monthly salary set forth herein will be reduced by the amount of the monthly insurance program.”

“That’s what this vote would have been … Is saying that [council is] not going to get the insurance covered by the city on this bucket, but [council is] still qualified to get it out of this bucket — taxpayer dollars — but it's coming out of your stipend. So, that's what this is really saying,” said Tobias.

After Tobias’ discussion, Alcorn-Reed stated that ordinance 1043 was already the standard, to which he replied: “Then they need to get a job.”

Tobias then made a motion to both repeal ordinance 1310 and amend ordinance 1043 to remove the line that allows council members to access city insurance paid through their stipend.

Mitchell requested the vote to amend ordinance 1043 to be separated from repealing ordinance 1310, stating it is the “right way to do it,” but the motion was not amended by Tobias.

The motion passed 5-1, with council member Lauralee Harris dissenting. Council member Bear Heiser was not in attendance and was excused, due to illness. Because the item required two readings, it was brought in front of council at the Aug. 6 meeting, where it passed 6-1, with Heiser dissenting.